Decolonising: reimagining the sensory order in post-colonial Portugal

Abstract

This essay offers a postcolonial reading of Portuguese society through a sociological lens, taking an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates history, anthropology, cultural studies and social psychology. It examines the persistence of colonialism in the sensory regimes, focusing on three interrelated dimensions: racialised violence, the resilience of luso-tropicalism as a technology of power, and aesthetic forms of resistance that challenge hegemonic codes of perception. Engaging with sensory studies, the essay mobilises the sensorium as an analytical device to explore the coloniality inscribed in the senses. Decolonisation is thus presented as an analytical, political and sensory undertaking that requires epistemic reconfiguration. The final question is not rhetorical, but methodological: what must be felt to decolonise?